Village of Sosnovka. Tambov District. Tambov Province.
The snow over Sosnovka's fields had gone two weeks without fresh fall, and the cold had compressed it into a hard, matte surface that crunched under boots with a dry, clean sound. Ivan Prokofyevich Sorokin crossed the open space between his house and the communal granary with short, controlled steps, avoiding the stretch near the well where ice built up in treacherous layers. He was fifty-four years old and had enough winters behind him to never hurry for any reason short of a fire.
He had been the village starosta, the communal elder, for fourteen years. The position wasn't decided by formal votes but by the quiet, accumulated consensus that emerges when a community recognizes in someone the ability to keep their head when things go wrong. Ivan had earned that recognition by settling boundary disputes, negotiating the terms of the collective lease with Baron Kuropatkin's administrator every spring, and distributing the grain reserves in the winter of 1905 with an evenhandedness that had kept everyone above the minimum without quite satisfying anyone completely.
That morning he had called the Mir assembly in the granary, the only space with a ceiling high enough to hold forty men without the tallest ones scraping their shoulders on the beams. The meeting had been called over a matter that had been circulating through the village for ten days in the form of contradictory rumors: the arrival of two government officials from Tambov carrying a sealed document and a proposal that, according to the rumors, had something to do with machines.
The men were already inside when Ivan entered. They had packed onto the wooden benches lining the granary walls, coats still unbuttoned because the heat of forty bodies and the central brazier made the space more bearable than outside. The kind of silence that precedes important discussions hung in the air, the kind where people look at the floor or their hands or any point that isn't another person's eyes.
The two officials from Tambov were standing near the brazier. The older one was named Nikolai Sergeyevich Volkov, inspector from the Provincial Department of Agriculture, and he was holding a brown leather briefcase from which he had extracted several papers that he now held without quite knowing where to put them down, since there was no table. The younger one, Andrei Fomich Kuznetsov, had the look of a man who had finished university not long ago and was still making an effort to appear confident in front of people who had twenty years of experience on him.
Ivan greeted them, took his usual seat facing the door, and looked at the inspector.
"Everyone's here. Say what you came to say."
Nikolai Sergeyevich cleared his throat. It was obvious he had rehearsed a more elaborate opening and that Ivan's directness had left it unusable.
"The Imperial Department of Agriculture, in accordance with the Agricultural Modernization Decree signed by Prime Minister Stolypin on the tenth of January of the present year, hereby notifies the peasant community of Sosnovka of its inclusion in the first group of villages in Tambov District selected to join the Empire's Machine and Tractor Station program. The program's abbreviation is MTS."
Murmurs among the men. Ivan didn't move.
"Explain what that means in terms that don't require knowing the language of government decrees."
Nikolai Sergeyevich opened the briefcase and took out a plan folded in quarters, which he partially unfolded. It was a sketch of a rectangular building with dimensions noted in the margins.
"The Imperial State will construct a machinery shed four kilometers from here, at the junction of the Sosnovka road and the Kirsanov route. That shed will initially house four Ilya tractors with their corresponding tillage equipment. Also a mechanical grain thresher and two mechanically driven seed drills. Operating and maintenance personnel will be provided by the State, four operators and a mechanic with technical training from the Putilov School in Saint Petersburg."
Fedot Ignatyevich Merkulov, who had the largest plot in the Mir and the deepest voice — spoke from the second bench.
"And the cost? What do they charge us for using the machinery?"
"The agreement stipulates twenty percent of the increase in production above your historical yield levels from the past five years. Not on the total harvest. Only on what you produce above that baseline through the use of the machinery."
Silence. The men exchanged glances with the particular quickness that peasants have.
Prokhor Vasilyevich Ryabov, who had a small plot and four children, looked up.
"If we produce the same as always, we pay nothing."
"Correct."
"And if we produce more with the machines, we pay twenty percent of the increase."
"That's right."
"And if the machines break down in the middle of planting?"
"The State mechanic is responsible for maintenance. Downtime due to mechanical failure is not charged."
Prokhor looked back at the floor, chewing over the information. Ivan was watching the men rather than the inspector. The reactions were what he expected, distrust in the older ones, calculation in the middle-aged, and something that in the younger ones resembled curiosity but that they were trying to conceal so as not to seem exposed.
Fyodor Grigoryevich Zaitsev, sixty years old, who had worked the same land for twenty of them that his father had worked before him, wiped his beard with the back of his hand.
"I've heard talk of those machines. Baron Kuropatkin said they're useless in our soils. That they sink in the spring mud. That they're no good for fine-grain sowing."
The inspector was about to reply but Ivan stopped him with a gesture.
"Have you seen one working?"
"No," Fyodor admitted.
"Then we're talking about what the Baron said, a man who owns a large tract of land leased to the Mir, and whose opinion on machinery that could make us independent of that lease cannot be taken as neutral."
Fyodor pursed his lips. It wasn't an argument he could easily refute.
Ivan turned to the inspector.
"Is there a village where these stations are already operating?"
"The first operational MTS went into service on the fifteenth of this month in Voronezh District. Two more are in the installation phase in Kursk and Saratov. Tambov is the fourth district."
"Can I go see it?"
Nikolai Sergeyevich seemed surprised by the concreteness of the request.
"The program doesn't include visits by communal representatives, but it doesn't prohibit them either. It could be coordinated with the Voronezh office."
"Then coordinate it. I won't sign anything until I've seen the machinery working in real soil with my own eyes."
The visit to Voronezh took four days to arrange. Ivan went alone, on the second-class train that left Tambov at six in the morning and arrived in Voronezh after midday with a stop in Gryazi. He brought in his coat pocket the oilcloth notebook where he recorded communal expenses, and a short pencil he had the habit of sharpening with his knife until it was down to about an inch and a half. Nothing else was needed.
The manager of the Voronezh MTS was named Sergei Afanasyevich Titov, thirty years old, with a mechanic's large hands and the accent of someone raised in Petersburg who had been in the south for a short time and hadn't quite adjusted to the pace of the countryside yet. He was competent without being condescending, which Ivan noted immediately in his favor.
The shed was a board-and-timber building with a corrugated galvanized roof and a floor of packed earth and gravel. Inside were four tractors lined up, too large for the eye to take in comfortably from the doorway. The first of them had its hood open and Titov was performing the daily oil-level check with a brass dipstick before the work day began.
Ivan walked slowly around the tractor without touching it. It was a tracked machine with a wide chassis, the engine at the front and a rear hitch for agricultural implements. The olive-green paint was already stained with earth and grease, but the overall condition was that of a machine receiving regular attention. On the side was a riveted plate with raised letters: PROJECT ILYA - PUTILOV 1912 - NO. 0047.
"How many working hours per day?"
"Ten during tillage season. Eight on days with hard frost, because cold starting uses more fuel and I prefer not to push the engine until it's been running for at least forty minutes."
"And how many problems have you had since they came into service?"
"Number four had a fan belt break on the third day. Half an hour of downtime for the replacement. Number one needed a valve adjustment in the second week, I knew it from the technical manual, it's normal in low temperatures. Numbers two and three with no incidents."
"Breakdowns that left a machine unusable for more than a day?"
"None."
Ivan wrote something in the notebook with the short pencil. Titov watched without rushing him.
"Would you like to see them working?"
"That's what I came for."
They went out to the field. The village of Nikiforovka, which had the contract with this MTS, had several communal members working on a stretch of land north of the shed. The ground in January was hard but not deeply frozen as it had been in the preceding weeks, because there had been a couple of days of partial thaw that left the top layer softer, and Titov had taken advantage of that window to do winter tillage that would prepare the soil for the spring planting.
Tractor number two was in full operation. It was pulling a four-bottom moldboard plow with a steady, even regularity that Ivan found difficult to describe to himself. It wasn't the tension of a horse straining against its harness with loaded muscles and flared nostrils. It was something else, a continuous mechanical cadence, without variations in rhythm, without rest, without the moment when the animal needs to catch its breath and the plowman has to stop the run.
The engine produced a deep and constant noise that Ivan mentally placed somewhere between the sound of a steam thresher and a slow train, and the furrows it left behind had a depth and straightness that no team of draft animals could have maintained for a hundred meters at a stretch.
The starosta of Nikiforovka, a man his own age named Yefim Kuznetsov, was standing at the edge of the field watching too. When he saw Ivan he approached with a slow step.
"Where are you from?"
"Tambov. Sosnovka."
"Are they bringing you into the program?"
"They're offering it to us. I came to see it first before deciding."
Yefim nodded with the quiet respect of someone who recognizes the same standard in another that he would apply himself.
"What do you want to know?"
"What isn't in the official documents."
Yefim thought for a moment.
"The first week, the people here didn't want to go near the machines. They said the smoke was bad for the grain, that the noise spooked the animals, that soil worked with heavy iron loses its fertility. The priest said the engine was the work of the devil because it burns without anyone blessing it."
"And now?"
"Now there are three young men asking the mechanic to teach them how to change the oil."
Ivan looked toward the tractor advancing across the field at its unchanging pace.
"Yields?"
"It's still early to compare harvests, we've been running for three weeks. But I've done the calculations on the land prepared. This winter we've tilled three times the surface area as last year in the same number of workdays. And the labor cost has come down because we don't need as many men for the heavy tillage. The ones who used to spend the week behind the plow are now free for other work."
Ivan noted that down too.
"Any conflict with the district Baron?"
Yefim looked at him with a half-smile that had a lifetime's relationship with landowners behind it.
"Baron Sokolnikov's administrator came in the second week to tell me the machines were damaging the right-of-way tracks and that we'd have to pay for repairs. I told him the right-of-way tracks are communal land under the 1906 decree and that he could consult with the provincial inspector if he wanted to continue the conversation. He didn't come back."
They stood in silence for a while, watching the tractor complete the stretch and turn at the end of the field in a slow but precise maneuver, repositioning the plow to attack the next pass.
"Would you sign again if you could choose all over?"
Yefim took his time answering, which to Ivan was a better sign than a quick reply.
"I'd sign. But with my eyes open. This doesn't solve all a village's problems. It solves one, the heavy land work. The rest are still ours."
Ivan returned to Sosnovka three days later with the notebook full and the decision made, though he hadn't yet said it aloud, because that wasn't his way. He needed one more night of silence before calling the assembly again.
That night, seated on the wooden bench beside the ceramic stove that heated his kitchen, with the notebook open on the table and the kerosene lamp doing what it could against the darkness, Ivan went over the figures he had written down in Voronezh.
Tractor number two had tilled, in the three weeks the Nikiforovka MTS had been operating, a hundred and forty-two hectares, about three hundred and fifty acres, of land. The previous year, the same village with its five pairs of oxen and hired seasonal laborers had worked a total of forty-six hectares, roughly a hundred and fourteen acres, in preparatory winter tillage. The difference wasn't small. It was the kind of difference that in years of drought or low grain prices determined how many sacks were left in the communal granary in February and how many weren't.
It wasn't that horses were bad. Sosnovka's horses were well-cared-for working animals, grain-fed, and had carried the village through for generations. But they had limits that depended on nobody's will, they tired, they got sick, they needed rest, they ate through the winter even when they weren't working, and they died sometimes at the worst possible moments.
A tractor didn't eat through the winter when it was standing idle. A tractor didn't spook and didn't break a leg stumbling in a deep furrow.
Ivan wrote the provincial inspector's name in the notebook, and the terms of the agreement: twenty percent of the increase. He closed the notebook.
He wasn't excited about the machine as a tool. He didn't despise it either. It was a tool with concrete advantages and with conditions of use that would need to be learned. The village would have to adapt, and adapting takes time and creates friction. Some men would have less direct tillage work and would need to find other things to do. The priest would probably keep on distrusting. Baron Kuropatkin would find ways to turn the change into a new source of pressure.
But the winter of 1905, when they had rationed grain to five hundred grams per person per day for six weeks, still weighed in Sosnovka's memory. And the possibility of having three times more land prepared for spring planting was a difference worth more than any reservation about engine noise or the opinions of landowners' administrators.
The assembly met the next day at four in the afternoon, when the light was beginning to fail and the men had finished the midday tasks. Ivan laid out what he had seen in Voronezh plainly and without omissions, including the minor problems of the first week and the complaint from Baron Sokolnikov's administrator. He read the figures for hectares tilled. He explained the twenty-percent formula with a concrete example using Sosnovka's historical yields that everyone knew by heart.
When he finished, Fedot Ignatyevich spoke first, as he usually did.
"What if the government changes the terms next year?"
"The agreement runs for five years with a negotiated review. That's in the document Nikolai Sergeyevich left."
"What if in two years the Ministry runs out of money and can't maintain the machines?"
"If the Ministry goes broke, we have bigger problems than the tractor."
Fedot went quiet. It wasn't that he was convinced. It was that he hadn't found a concrete argument he could sustain against the numbers Ivan had put on the table.
Prokhor, the one with four children, raised his hand.
"Can a person learn to run that machine?"
"The station mechanic gives training to any communal member who wants it. No extra cost."
Prokhor nodded and lowered his hand.
Old Fyodor Grigoryevich said nothing. He spent several minutes staring at the granary floor while the others talked, and when Ivan asked whether there were any further formal objections before putting the agreement to a vote, he looked up.
"My father plowed this same soil with a wooden plow. I plow it with iron. My son..."
He stopped, as if he didn't know how to finish the sentence, or as if he had already finished it in some way that the others could complete without needing words.
Ivan waited.
"Vote yes," Fyodor said at last, and looked back at the floor.
The vote was thirty-seven in favor, two against, one abstention. The two against were Stepan Lukyanich Voronin, whose plot bordered the road where the tractors would travel and who was worried about his boundary markers, and the priest, Father Timofei, who had no formal vote in the Mir but whom Ivan had invited out of respect, and whose position was already known to everyone.
Ivan signed the document that afternoon before inspector Nikolai Sergeyevich, who had returned to Sosnovka for the assembly at the starosta's request. He signed with the pen the inspector offered him, his angular, small handwriting, in the designated space below the heading that read:
Legal representative of the peasant community of Sosnovka, Tambov District, Tambov Province.
When he finished signing he returned the pen and folded his copy of the document into quarters and tucked it inside the oilcloth notebook.
The inspector extended his hand.
Ivan shook it.
"The station will be operational in six weeks," said Nikolai Sergeyevich.
"By then there will still be soil to prepare before planting," Ivan replied. "Don't arrive late."
On the way back to his house, with the afternoon already closed and the January cold settling over Sosnovka in earnest, Ivan crossed the open space between the granary and the back door. The ice near the well was still in the same place. He went around it by the same path as before.
He wasn't excited about progress the way some of the young men were, the ones who had been asking about mechanic training. He didn't carry Fyodor's weight of years either, the weight of a man who had seen too many promising changes end in nothing or worse than nothing. What he had were the numbers: a hundred and forty-two hectares in three weeks against forty-six in an entire winter.
That number was Sosnovka eating better in the winter of 1913. It was the communal granary with more margin in February. It was Prokhor's four children with enough bread.
The rest, whether the machine was noisy, whether the smoke smelled bad, whether Baron Kuropatkin would find new ways to apply pressure, the rest was the work of the days ahead. And the days always brought their work.
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